Sunday, Mar. 20, 2016 – Tough Day at the Car Rental

With a job planned in Atlanta this week, Hubby and I decided the best option was to rent a car and drive up, so the morning started out with us packing for the trip, until we had to pick up the contracted car at 2:00. Normally I use Thrifty or Alamo, but since their nearest offices were down at the airport, we found that Budget had an office in Jupiter, so had set the reservation up there. We arrived in the parking lot at 2:02 and I went to the door a minute later. I tried to open it, but it wouldn’t open. I shook it a couple of times, thinking maybe it was jammed or I was pushing the wrong way, and I still couldn’t get it open. Finally I pressed my head to the glass and saw two people inside, apparently the clerk and a customer. The clerk indicated by sliding his finger across his throat that they were closed! I said through the glass that I had a reservation, but he continued to say they were closed. I waited outside because I knew he had to open up to let the other customer out, and when he finally did, I tried to insist that I had a reservation that he had to honor, and he spouted some ridiculous story about the computers “automatically” shutting down at 2:00. If that was the case, then they should have made their last appointment at 1:45, not 2:00. No matter what I did, he was determined to not let me have the car I had reserved, and in the end, he sauntered off mumbling in his foreign language. We had no choice but to drive all the way down to the airport to rent one. We went to Thrifty, and were greeting warmly by the counter man there, and he graciously and happily rented me a car, upgraded to full size, and managed to reduce the price under a corporate account (since it was now Spring Break, the normal price of $25 a day that I had reserved at Budget 3 weeks earlier was now up to $70 for all the car companies), and send me over to the parking area to pick out my car. We had several choices, but opted for the Toyota Camry, after Hubby tried out the passenger seats of them all and decided it was the most comfortable. So we headed back home, now having spent 3 hours on a job that I had only planned an hour for, and were rushing around the rest of the evening, and into the night, to get everything packed and ready to go first thing in the morning. What a pain! You can believe I’m going to be writing a terse complaint to Budget, and most definitely crossing them off my list of future rentals!

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